I personally think that the topic is far too wide to provide a solid grounding in just one semester. What I would advise is that you should find out the common

I personally think that the topic is far too wide to provide a solid grounding in just one semester. What I would advise is that you should find out the common ways that that the students would use this knowledge, and explore the concepts that relate to their work. For example, I recently put together a 10 week course (1 hour per week) to introduce HTML and CSS to the marketing/sales/editorial staff in my department. I work for a prominent Australian news/media company, and we draw inspiration for new site features and improvements from across the entire department. We (the developers and product team) felt that the rest of the department would feel more confident in suggesting ideas (or making judgements about feasibility) if they knew what work goes into the presentation/interaction side of our websites. We spent the first 2 weeks introducing the web and giving a bit of back story, and heavily enforcing the most up to date web standards. We then spent the remainder of the course jumping between HTML and CSS, and eventually had the team dreaming up ideas for widgets that we could add to the sites, and being more creative with inline content in our stories (having fun in the HTML mode of the WYSIWYG editor that they never got to see before). So to wrap this up: * engage your audience * find out what they plan to use the skills for * lay out coursework that works towards them achieving their personal challenges You'll find them more attentive, more eager, and looking forward to whatever the next semester contains.